Yeah, buy a one gig stick of RAM if your motherboard can handle it. There is a huge difference between 500 and 1500.

Speed of the RAM is also important for extra performance, but your RAM will only be as fast as your slowest stick of RAM, so for optimal performance you might want to change your old stick too if it's slow. Of course you don't necesarilly need fast RAM. 1500 slow RAM is still way better than 500 RAM.

I still refuse to use more than a gig. No game really utilizes that much. To me it is like having a gig of Vram on your card, what's the point? The difference between 1 and 2 gigs in games is practically unnoticeable and since games are optimized to dump it every so often all you're really doing is delaying that dump for twice as long...why bother?

Apparently the upcoming Vista is even more 'ram-friendly' since it makes other applications 'sleep' when running a frontline app. (i.e. a game). Although I gather the overall running requirement is higher than Win XP.

First of all I'm admittedly a bit biased towards RAM as I use my PC for work as well, and run some extremely memory-hungry applications. [img]smile.gif[/img]

Doesnt the (probably a tad more bloated than the final release) current Vista beta use something like 800MB of RAM?

VRAM is only used by games, RAM on the other hand helps Windows over all and extend the lifespan by a year or two (at least for me it meant that I could save my upgrade until I encountered a graphically demanding game that I really wanted), while not being as hideously expensive as a high-end graphics card. Memory performance isnt increasing nearly as fast as that of some other components (GPU etc) either, making an investment in RAM a bit more future proof.

Your priorities might be a bit different if you buy new graphically demanding games very often, but its still unwise to let RAM lag behind the rest of the system.

The 512MB in Jelly's system is definitely too little today and will force a lot of swapping as Windows will use virtual memory much of the time. Windows XP, a firewall and AV will eat up a few hundred megabytes on their own.